“We were looking into her father. He’s a shitty guy who spent his life beating her, and we wanted to make him pay. But then we came across her juvie record. Its long man, all sorts of things but mostly theft and conning people.” Nate tried to defend his actions, even though he felt like shit for exploding on her. He knew she wasn’t doing that to them, nor had she planned to. She was just too innocent to pull something like that off. Which if he thought about it, made her perfect for it, except she was too honest. They had only just finished reading the information when she knocked on their door. It had barely sunk in, and the accusations flew out of his mouth before he could even filter them.
Silence on the other end of the line had him pulling it away from his ear and checking to see if the call disconnected. Seeing that it hadn’t, Nate waited for the explosion he was sure was coming. “Text me the address,” was all Dane said before hanging up.
“What the fuck are we going to do if she doesn’t let us apologize, Nate? We just got the info, but fuck! The look on her face when she got on the bus almost brought me to my knees.” Ty said evenly. “What did Dane say?” He asked as an afterthought.
“We’re fucked,” was all Nate said, while watching the bus like a hawk.
*******
Not wanting to give voice to his fears Ty just drove, following the bus in the hopes that Keeley would get off soon. Seeing Nate texting out of the corner of his eyes, he figured he was telling Dane where they were at now. After following the bus for over an hour, it finally turned it’s out of service sign on. As it stopped at the bus station, Ty put the truck in park and they both hopped out going to the front door, waiting for her to get off.
Hearing another truck door slam shut, Ty turned to see Dane striding their way. Ty wasn’t scare
d of many men, if any at all, but Dane was in a league of his own. He was an extremely large man, standing at six feet nine inches tall and weighing just over three hundred pounds. He scared a lot of people with his size, but it wasn’t his size that put Ty on edge, it was his combat training that made him a deadly weapon.
Dane stopped in front of them. “You fuckers are lucky you’re my friends or I’d kill you both for this, I hope you fucking know that. Shit. I still might,” was all Dane said before knocking on the bus doors, waiting for the driver to open them and boarding it. They watched him walk all the way to the back, before bending down and trying to coax Keeley to get up and go with him. After about twenty minutes of back and forth between the two, they could see Dane clearly got exasperated and just picked her up in a fireman’s hold, before walking back off. Putting her down in front of them, he told them all, “You two fuckers fuck with this girl again, and you’re dead. She’s a hell of a lot more mule-headed than you two combined. And you, little lady…,” he quieted, grabbing the back of her head gently. “Listen to what they have to say. I’ll be in my truck waiting for whether you want to leave with them or me,” he said before doing just that.
“You are not leaving with him, Butte—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped, interrupting Nate and shocking them both.
“Oh Butterfly, I will never stop calling you that no matter how much we fuck up, or how mad you are at us. You are and always will be my Butterfly,” Nate told her. “I’m sorry we jumped on you like that Butterfly. I won’t offer any excuses because none would be good enough, but let us explain what happened, please?” At her nod, they started to tell her how and what they were doing. That they were shocked from the record they found on her. They didn’t have the time they needed to process the information, before she knocked on the door. When they finally finished with an apology, and promised to not jump to conclusions again and simply ask her what was going on, she still hadn’t said anything to them or even looked up at them. The wait was killer. To know whether she could forgive them or not was almost Ty’s undoing.
Watching her finally look up at them, she nodded her head and walked over to Dane. He couldn’t believe that they had screwed up so monumentally, and so soon. Ty felt a piece of his heart leave with her, when they saw her step up onto the driver’s side running board and talk to Dane for a moment, before she gave him a kiss on the cheek. As she stepped down and started walking back towards them, he felt a huge weight lifted off his shoulder. Stopping to turn and wave at Dane while he pulled away, Keeley faced them again, just staring. Scrutinizing them like one would a bug under a microscope. When she started walking forward again, they both held their breath.
“I don’t know if I can forgive you yet, you hurt me. I loved you and you both hurt me so bad. You just assumed I was nothing more than a common criminal. That what I did was because I wanted to, and it wasn’t. I live with the guilt of having taken that money from those people every day, when they did nothing but try to help a little girl in need of a safe place.” Taking a breath she continued on, with tears in her eyes and a trembling lip. “Please believe that if I could, I would pay back every cent taken, but the fact remains that I don’t even know who I stole from. My Mom chose my mark and it was completely random.”
Stepping forward Nate grabbed her up in a hug, wrapping her arms around his neck and legs around his waist. Ty then walked up to her back and pressed against her. With Nate kissing her on the left side of her neck and Ty kissing her on the right, they apologized again and just held her for a few minutes before Nate let her go, and they walked over to the truck climbing in and heading home.
Chapter 13
After such an exhausting couple of days, all Keeley wanted to do was be left alone and curl up into a ball and sleep for about a week. She understood their anger to a point; she would have been shocked to learn that about someone, too, but the accusations stung. The fact that they didn’t even want to listen to what she had to say, and the way they both looked at her, it hurt a lot. She wasn’t lying when she said that it was easier to put it all behind her and forget about it, because if she thought about it too much the guilt overwhelmed her.
Before she was old enough to work, and even sometimes after, her parents used to make her steal and con people into believing she was homeless, so they’d give her money. It worked too, for the most part. There were times when they would offer her a place to stay, and sometimes she accepted, but if she did she knew she had to steal something valuable from them or her parents would retaliate by hitting her.
Her father used to have this really thick leather belt, and he would make her kneel on the floor and whip her bare back with it, until she bled. Thankfully, she doesn’t have scars from it. Probably because the lashes never went too deep into her skin. One night when she was around eleven, she had stolen the belt and hid it the neighbor’s garbage cans, about a block away. That only angered her father more, and she ended up with her first broken nose because of it. To this day she still doesn’t regret it, because she knew that eventually her father would have killed her.
Sitting on the window bench in her room, Keeley thought about what Dane had said to her on the bus. Their anger comes from the fact that they’re mad that they weren’t there to help you, not that you did it. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t. She wanted to believe it was, but she’d been so hurt that they thought she was going to steal from them and their parents, it was hard to get past. It made her think about what they really thought about her. Did they think she was white trash? Because she was, she knew that, so how could they not?
All these questions running through her mind were giving her a migraine. Getting up she walked downstairs to see if they had any Advil. Hearing hushed voices in the kitchen, she stopped just outside of it and listened when she heard her name.
“I can’t believe we almost lost her, Nate. Keeley is so much more than what she thinks. She’s perfect and we nearly screwed everything up. Fuck!” Tyler nearly shouted. He thinks I’m perfect? She thought looking down at herself, not seeing it.
“I know man, we need to cool our heads though. Her father has to pay for what he’s done to her. Twenty years of abuse and uncertainty is unacceptable. He needs to know she’s going to have a better life, and that had he treated her with respect, he would have had one, too. The selfish prick,” Nathaniel said to his brother.
“How do we make her forgive us? To believe in us again? I never want to see that look on her face, it nearly killed me. She was so lost and I couldn’t do anything to make it better.”
“Don’t worry Ty, she’ll come around. We’re just going have to show her that we worship the ground she walks on, that she is not only beautiful on the outside but the inside as well.”
Hearing them talk about her like that soothed something inside; her anger lessened and her heart melted. Clearing her throat and walking in, she whispered a quick, “Hi”.
Turning around when they heard her, huge smiles spread across their faces and she lost her breath. They were both extremely handsome men that was true, but the happiness radiating from them both at seeing her, erased any lingering doubts about whether she could move past today or not.
“You ok, Butterfly? Do you need anything?” Nathaniel asked her eagerly. Looking to Tyler she saw the eagerness to help her reflected in his eyes, as well. Not knowing where she got the bravery from, she whispered out, “You”, before walking back up to their room in the hopes that they’d follow her, migraine completely forgotten.
Hearing their pounding feet on the stairs, she slowly started to strip off her shirt and shorts. She was enticingly taking off her thong, bent over slightly with her ass facing the door, when they walked in. Taking a peek over her shoulder, she saw them both frozen in the doorway, with their gazes riveted to her exposed ass and pussy. Giving a little wiggle to shake her thong the rest of the way down her legs and stepping out of it, she heard dual groans coming from them.
Walking up to the bed, Keeley bent over and slowly began to crawl to the top. Looking over her shoulder when she was half-way up, Nathaniel and Tyler were still in the same spot, so she smiled seductively and asked, “Coming?” That got them moving; stripping their clothes off as they came closer. Nathaniel stared at her with hooded eyes and a small smirk, and told her, “Don’t move from that spot, Butterfly.”